Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,14

have guys down here in the crowd with the rifles? C’mon, Bob . . .”

“When you’re right, you’re right,” Bob said. Two nearly naked young women, wearing thongs, tops the size of bottle caps, sunglasses, and skates, rolled out of an exhibition hall ahead of them and they stopped talking for a moment. When they started again, Bob said, “Talk about flawless assets.”

“Assets,” Lucas agreed.

Another young woman walked by, wearing what appeared to be a knee-length white T-shirt imprinted with it’s not gonna lick itself.

“I got nothin’,” Bob said.

* * *

Though it was still early, the sun was pounding down like a laser and they were beginning to sweat; the whole crowd smelled of SPF 50 banana-scented sunscreen and boiled hot dogs. A man in a captain’s hat and a Fountaine Pajot catamaran T-shirt pointed them to a line of exhibition halls where, after wandering around for a while, they found Barney Hall, working in an equipment booth that sold a brand of line-cutters that attached to boat props. He and another salesman were standing next to a video screen that showed a rope being chopped to pieces by the whirling cutter, rather than entangling the prop itself. When Lucas and Bob identified themselves, Barney nodded and said, “There’s a food court out back, we could talk there.”

* * *

Hall led the way past a hundred boat-equipment displays and out the back of the building to a line of food booths where they bought Cokes and found a table where they could sit in the shade. Bob was already sweating heavily: “This place is as humid as New Orleans,” he said.

“Record heat today,” Hall said, as they sat down. “Been hot since April.” Hall was dressed like Lucas and Bob: loose shirt, shorts, athletic shoes. He said, “I’ve been interviewed a whole bunch of times . . .”

“We read them all,” Lucas said. “A lot of the questions were about what you did, rather than what the killers did when they were jumping off the boat.”

Hall leaned forward, put his elbows on the tabletop. “That part, I mean, what they did, only lasted maybe a minute. I keep seeing it over and over in my mind . . . I’m told I don’t have PTSD, but that traumatic events tend to stick with you, and I guess this was sorta traumatic. The Coast Guard made me talk to a shrink about it, and the doc said that sometimes you even make up some parts to . . . embellish . . . your real memories. I don’t think that’s happened with me. It’s all like a movie that I see sometimes before I go to sleep, and it hasn’t changed.”

“What I’d like you to do is rerun the dream for us, if you can,” Lucas said. “Close your eyes, see it. I don’t care about the parts before you closed in on the Mako. I only care about the people you saw on the boat—and maybe a little about the boat handling.”

“You guys know anything about boats?” Hall asked.

Bob said, “Bass boat,” and Lucas added, “I’ve got a twenty-one-foot aluminum Lund with a Yamaha 250 on the back, strictly for fishing, in Wisconsin. I don’t know anything about saltwater boats.”

“Okay . . . well, big boats and small boats are roughly the same, up to a point. If you can run two hundred and fifty horses, you could run the Mako with a couple hours on the water. You got a little more inertia to deal with . . . So anyway, it was tearing down the Intracoastal Waterway, which is right over there, on the other side of the boat basin.”

He pointed toward one of the superyachts, hulking over the equipment sales building. “I was chasing after him in my own boat, which is slower than the Mako. This was after . . . well, I knew the guys in the Coast Guard boat were dead. So I’m chasing him . . .”

“Go ahead,” Lucas said.

Hall leaned back and closed his eyes. “He was flyin’. Then all of a sudden, he cut right. There’s part of Port Everglades over there, a terminal. There was a white SUV already parked there. Maybe a Toyota. The Mako cuts over there . . .”

He paused in the story, his eyelids fluttering, then he continued:

“Four guys got off the bow of the boat. No, three guys, at first. One guy ran ahead to get the car and back it up, two guys were